Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be...

If we want to create a viable, peaceful world, we’ve got to integrate compassion into the gritty realities of 21st century life.

Now I think one of the reasons why religion developed in the way that it did over the centuries was precisely to curb this murderous bent that we have as human beings.

Theologians in all the great faiths have devised all kinds of myths to show that this type of kenosis, of self-emptying, is found in the life of God itself. They do not do this because...

Fundamentalists are not friends of democracy. And that includes your fundamentalists in the United States.

By increasing the amount of Torah (obligatory religious laws) in the world, they were extending His presence in the world and making it more effective.

I like silence; I’m a gregarious loner and without the solitude, I lose my gregariousness.

I was a lousy nun. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t find God. It wasn’t suitable for me. It is suitable for very few people.

If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind,...

Today we often think that before we start living a religious life we have first to accept the creedal doctrines and that before one can have any comprehension of the loyalty and trust of faith,...

When violence becomes imbedded in a region, then this affects everything. It affects your dreams, your fantasies and relationships, and your religion becomes violent, too.

believe” it in the abstract; like any mythos, it depended upon the rituals associated with the cult of a particular holy place to make what it signified a reality in the lives of participants.The same...

Pain is something that’s common to human life. When we ignore it, we aren’t engaging in the whole reality, and the pain begins to fester.

In the tenth century BC, the priests of India devised the Brahmodya competition, which would become a model of authentic theological discourse. The object was to find a verbal formula to define the Brahman, the...

Jesus did not spend a great deal of time discoursing about the trinity or original sin or the incarnation, which have preoccupied later Christians. He went around doing good and being compassionate.

In the past some of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians, such as Maimonides, Aquinas and Ibn Sina, made it clear that it was very difficult to speak about God, because when we...

This was the scientific age, and people wanted to believe that their traditions were in line with the new era, but this was impossible if you thought that these myths should be understood literally. Hence...

Mohammed was not an apparent failure. He was a dazzling success, politically as well as spiritually, and Islam went from strength to strength to strength.

Compassion is not a popular virtue.

[T]he family is a school of compassion because it is here that we learn to live with other people. (68)

Every fundamentalist movement I’ve studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is convinced at some gut, visceral level that secular liberal society wants to wipe out religion.

…a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to...

Religious people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate. Often, they don’t want to give up their egotism. They want their religion to endorse their ego, their identity.

Islam is a religion of success. Unlike Christianity, which has as its main image, in the west at least, a man dying in a devastating, disgraceful, helpless death.

We can either emphasize those aspects of our traditions, religious or secular, that speak of hatred, exclusion, and suspicion or work with those that stress the interdependence and equality of all human beings. The choice...

Ironically, the first thing that appealed to me about Islam was its pluralism. The fact that the Koran praises all the great prophets of the past.

Human beings have always been mythmakers.

If it is not tempered by compassion, and empathy, reason can lead men and women into a moral void. (95)

The values of Islam are expressed by Muslims clearly. September 11 changed the world, and put Muslims on the spotlight.

We have seen that a myth could never approached in a purely profane setting. It was only comprehensible in a liturgical context that set it apart from everyday life; it must be experienced as part...

The hajj is one of the five essential practices of Islam; when they make the pilgrimage to Mecca, Muslims ritually act out the central principles of their faith.

For centuries, the Muslims were able to co-exist perfectly well with Jews and Christians in the Middle East.

I had failed to make a gift of myself to God.

I have a very sharp tongue, I’m very impatient, and it’s a lifelong struggle.

I have nothing maternal in me, and men want to be mothered a lot of the time.

Compassion dervies from the Latin patiri and the Greek pathein, meaning “to suffer, undergo or experience.” So “compassion” means “to endure [something] with another person,” to put ourselves in somebody else’s shoes, to feel her...

Yes, all fundamentalists feel that in a secular society, God has been relegated to the margin, to the periphery and they are all in different ways seeking to drag him out of that peripheral position,...

We are meaning-seeking creatures. Dogs, as far as we know, do not agonise about the canine condition, worry about the plight of dogs in other parts of the world, or try to see their lives...

But human beings fall easily into despair, and from the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting, that revealed an underlying pattern, and gave us a...

The first person to promulgate the Golden Rule, which was the bedrock of this empathic spirituality, was Confucius 500 years before Christ.

We are absolutely right to condemn the suicide bomber’s targeting of innocent civilians and mourn his victims. But as we have seen, in war the state also targets such victims; during the 20th century, the...

Mythology and science both extend the scope of human beings. Like science and technology, mythology, as we shall see, is not about opting out of this world, but about enabling us to live more intensely...

Even before 9/11 I was gripped by a sense of dread: our lack of criticism about what we were doing in the Middle East – the slagging off of a whole religious tradition.

Then, as now, there would always be people who preferred the option of devoting their religious energies to sacred space over the more difficult duty of compassion.

Compassion doesn’t, of course, mean feeling sorry for people, or pity, which is how the word has become emasculated in a way.

What seems wrong to you is right for himWhat is poison to one is honey to someone else.Purity and impurity, sloth and diligence in worship,These mean nothing to Me.I am apart from all that.Ways of...

Compassion is a practically acquired knowledge, like dancing. You must do it and practice diligently day by day.

There are some forms of religion that are bad, just as there’s bad cooking or bad art or bad sex, you have bad religion too.

When the horror recedes and the world resumes its normal shape, you cannot forget it. You have seen what is “really” there, the empty horror that exists when the consoling illusion of our mundane experience...

I am not interested in the afterlife. Religion is supposed to be about losing your ego, not preserving it eternally in optimum conditions.